Quotes & Sayings About Roulette

When you're mortal, life is nothing more than a drawn-out game of Russian Roulette. Every moment is the spin of a gun cylinder, every decision pointing the barrel at your head. Over and over, again and again, you pull the trigger, hoping it won't be your last turn in the game. — J.M. Darhower

Because golf exposes the flaws of the human swing - a basically simple maneuver - it causes more self-torture than any game short of Russian roulette. — Grantland Rice

Awe! Leaving so soon?" Gabby said sweetly, holding the door open. "I was just about to pull out the gun for you to play single-player Russian Roulette. — Laura Kreitzer

I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds. — David Mamet

The notion of mental accounts is absent in traditional economic theory, which holds that wealth in general, and money in particular, should be fungible: That is, $100 in roulette winnings, $100 in salary, and a $100 tax refund should have the same significance and value to you, since each C-note could buy the same number of downloads from iTunes or the same number of burgers at McDonald's. Likewise, $100 kept under the mattress should invoke the same feelings or sense of wealth as $100 in a bank account or $100 in U.S. Treasury securities (ignoring the fact that money in the bank, or in T-bills, is safer than cash under the bed). If money and wealth are fungible, there should be no difference in the way we spend gambling winnings or salary. — Gary Belsky

Falling for someone can be a lot like playing roulette. You don't know what will happen when you place that bet, but you can take a deep breath anyway and put all the chips out there. And when the ball spins around and around, you pray it lands on your number. Probability says you'll likely lose, and in this game of love with Leo, odds were I would lose, too, but I had to try. — Ilsa Madden-Mills

Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ... It really depends on your perspective. — China Mieville

I'm glad I don't have a lot of money in the market. And quite frankly, you'd be better off giving your money to a colorblind roulette addict than put it in the stock market. — Dennis Miller

In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number. — Steven Wright

When I was doing drugs and alcohol, I thought I'll have a drink and a line of this and I'll smoke this. I didn't go, 'Then I'm going to go out and get drunk, come back strangle my wife and wake up in jail on charges of attempted murder,' but that's what happened. I'm not telling people what to do. If they can enjoy doing it and they get on with it and they can handle it fine, but don't involve me. I'm lucky to be alive; you're playing with Russian roulette. — Ozzy Osbourne

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feed pulled to. — Christopher Moore

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn't really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money. — Michael Lewis

Let's play Russian roulette. If you win, I give you a Colombian necktie. — Natalya Vorobyova

Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free. — Jessica Livingston

Russian Roulette is not the same without a gun — Lady Gaga

The Columbia accident made us realize that we had been playing Russian roulette with the shuttle crews
that we had been very, very fortunate in the past that the foam did not cause critical damage. — Wayne Hale

The best advice I can give people when they buy Burgundy, which is a bit of a roulette game, is to look for producers who are tried and true ... Look for the name of the producer, whether Michel Lafarge, Domaine Leflaivre, Dominique Lafont, or another. When they put their name on the bottle, they're proud. — Daniel Johnnes

The Asia-Pacific Partnership is a climate suicide pact. It is playing Russian roulette with six bullets in your gun. — Joseph J. Romm

She was a woman attempting to make some sense of, and get some satisfaction from, a life that seemed to have no more logic than a roulette wheel. — Vincent Canby

I like playing roulette, I like dice. I grew up with gamblers. — Chazz Palminteri

Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it. — Jenny Offill

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity. — Dean Koontz

This [climate change] is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. Do we want to play Russian roulette with two bullets or one? — Nicholas Stern

Wall Street wants to keep its schemes too complicated to understand so that the roulette wheel can keep turning. — Maria Cantwell

I've been giving a little gamble on the roulette and just sitting having a coffee with the fans, chatting away. — Ricky Hatton

Despite what those on the happily coupled sidelines might think, 99 percent of online dates weren't exciting enough to be fun or nerve-racking enough to be adventurous. They were just...awkward. Boring. An hour of small talk with someone you'd think twice about saving from a burning building. Online dating was like Russian roulette. Mostly misses. But sometimes, people Evie knew had met that all-too-rare bullet: a smart, aesthetically pleasing New Yorker who was still single. Maybe tonight, Evie thought, is the night I blow my brains out. — Georgia Clark

Russian Roulette, killer in all black. — Jasmine Sandozz

Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette. — Paul Collier

The record of a month's roulette playing at Monte Carlo can afford us material for discussing the foundations of knowledge. — Karl Pearson

been programmed in the womb or maybe at conception and there's no escaping. The roulette wheel spins and stops and your number comes up and that's what you are no matter how hard you try or even if you don't try at all. You are what you are, you are what you're not, and other events and other people just enhance the angel or devil, the winner or the loser in you. It's all about the spinning of the wheel, whether it's hitting the winning home run in the World Series or being raped. Decided — Patricia Cornwell

With most people suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The two other bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Thaniel listened for a while longer, because the silence was so deep and clear that he could hear ghosts of the thirty-six of thirty-seven possible worlds in which Grace had not won at the roulette, and not stepped backward into him. He wished then that he could go back and that the ball had landed on another number. He would be none the wiser and he would be staying at Filigree Street, probably for years, still happy, and he wouldn't have stolen those years from a lonely man who was too decent to mention that they were missing. — Natasha Pulley

I'm the type of guy where one thing leads to another and eventually it gets awful. If I put a $5 bet on a roulette table tonight at 10 o'clock, by tomorrow at noon I would be running guns to Cuba. — Artie Lange

I just do a random roulette wheel version of what I've recorded or sometimes tunes I haven't recorded. It's a collection of whatever happens, happens. — Leon Redbone

When the boys at school found out I had a potentially fatal peanut allergy, they used to hold me up against a wall and play Russian Roulette with a bag of Revels! — Milton Jones

For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing. — Jonathan Haidt

I don't do romance, in the same way I don't do heroin Russian roulette, or nude alligator wrestling. I consider all of the above self-destructive, and demeaning and these are things up with which I will not put. — D.D. Barant

And when Tolstoy found God his lines went limp, and Turgenev on his deathbed grieved for him because although Tolstoy had given up his land and his coppers for God, he had also given up something else. And although Dostoevski ended up on believing in Christ, he took the long road to get there, a most interesting and perhaps unwholesome road over roulette tables, raping a small child, standing before a wall waiting for the rifles to fire, he found that "adversity is the main-spring of self-realism," he found his Christ, but what a most interesting Christ, a self-made Christ, and I bow to him. — Charles Bukowski

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown. — George Bernard Shaw

Screen is satisfying because it's so technical and mysterious. It's like playing roulette: you get a script, you think it's either great or naff, but you have no idea how it will really turn out. On stage, you are your own editor - and you get brief moments of grace, where suddenly you feel free. — Toby Stephens

I have a nut allergy. When I was at school the other children used to make me play Russian roulette but force-feeding me a packet of Revels. — Milton Jones

Condoms are about as effective against AIDS as a twenty-four-chamber gun instead of a six-chamber gun when playing Russian roulette. — Peter Kreeft

We sense a dangerous disease infecting our modern culture and eroding hope: an increasingly prevalent view that greatness owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline
that what happens to us matters more than what we do. In games of chance like a lottery or roulette, this view seems plausible. But taken as an entire philosophy, applied more broadly to human endeavor, it's a deeply debilitating life perspective, one that we can't imagine wanting to teach young people. Do we really believe that our actions count for little, that those who create something great are merely lucky, that our circumstances imprison us? Do we want to build a society and culture that encourage us to believe that we aren't responsible for our choices and accountable for our performance? — James C. Collins

THE LANTERN IN THE LIFEBOAT I am nervous. I'm afraid. But I will stand here in the white hot heat of you. I will play Russian roulette with your playlists. I will tell jokes I'm not sure you'll find funny. I will hold on until there is no more reason to. And in the end, I will break the stars and resurrect the sun. — Pleasefindthis

In the car, Edgar felt something like panic. The air itself was turning to cement. He didn't understand that this imprisonment was an illusion, a phantasm of grief. He truly believed that life might be over, that all stories would unfold in the already-lived, the sole place in which his grandmother was not dead.

But as he looked out the window, he saw how the landscape moved by so fast that it blurred. Trees and billboards slapped past his consciousness with the clicking intensity of a roulette wheel. Edgar felt a desire for something else. Perhaps there were other arrangements a person could make with time. — Victor Lodato

She'd barely survived him the first time. Playing emotional roulette with him now was dangerous. Even if it felt damn good to be in his arms again. — Catherine Bybee

One of many problems with survey research in general is that you can only survey the survivors. In other words, if you were to do a survey of people who were known to have played Russian Roulette and you sent out the questions before the time they were going to play and then you come back six months after they played Russian Roulette, you would probably discover that among the people who did come back there was no harm done. — Thomas Sowell

The slot machines sit there like young courtesans, promising pleasures undreamed of, your deepest desires fulfilled, all lusts satiated. — Frank Scoblete

I think as far as I've been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with and things like that is that it almost seems like Russian Roulette when you're coming out of the closet to your parents. — Jason Ritter

Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there's as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product. — Richard Corliss

You play crotch roulette, you're gonna hit double zero once in a while. — Tucker Max

As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him. — Benjamin Graham

He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime. — Stefan Zweig

When you vote, you play Russian Roulette with a magazine fed pistol. — Tom Wallace

Horse racing is animated roulette. — Roger Kahn

A certain wise man once said that God didn't play dice with the universe, but that man was wrong. Sometimes I think He must even try Russian roulette. — Daina Chaviano

If I had the money and the drinking capacity, I'd probably live at a roulette table and let my life go to hell. — Michael Ventura

I don't really care for or that much about Chat Roulette. I think the phenomenon of it and like the first wow factor which was so absolutely insane about Chat Roulette. Certainly that's what inspired me to make that movie but I think that's true for everyone that used Chat Roulette which is why it was such an explosion. Now it's just kind of disappeared. You don't hear much about it anymore. — Casey Neistat

I never make conscious decisions. If my agent says to me, "It's a good script," I'll do it. I don't plan. I've got a lot of things to do. I'm at the roulette table and my luck seems to be running at the moment. I might as well stay there until it runs out. — Anthony Hopkins

But we were playing Russian roulette with my ovaries and eventually my ovaries were going to succumb to the bullet. — Kristen Ashley

The independents who were our fiercest competitors all succumbed to the one-hit-makes-you-a-genius philosophy. It is a mistake to think you have the magic touch. Show business is roulette. If you start to play for stakes you can't afford, there's no way you can survive. — Samuel Goldwyn

If I gamble, I'll play roulette. My wife and I will play roulette, and that's about it. I'm not a heavy gambler. — Tracy Morgan

He said, "You are the russian roulette of my casino."
..and I shot him dead, then and there with my russian roulette.. I am the Goddess of Russian Mafia.. — Himmilicious

You mean something like 'truth or dare'? I haven't played that in a long time." She didn't think he would ever get himself entangled in a game like that, but it was addictive, a compromising icebreaker featuring all the strategy of Poker, minus the cards, mixed with a dash of danger from Russian Roulette, without the revolver. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Your email inbox is a bit like a Las Vegas roulette machine. You know, you just check it and check it, and every once in a while there's some juicy little tidbit of reward, like the three quarters that pop down on a one-armed bandit. And that keeps you coming back for more. — Douglas Rushkoff

It's amazing how people define roles for themselves and put handcuffs on their experience and are constantly surprised by the things a roulette universe spins at them. — Terry Pratchett

A second problem is called "anchoring". In a classic study Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman secretly fixed a roulette wheel to land on either 10 or 65. The researchers span the wheel before their subjects, who were then asked to guess the percentage of members of the United Nations that were in Africa. Participants were influenced by irrelevant information: the average guess after a spin of 10 was 25%; for a spin of 65, it was 45%. In meetings, anchoring leads to a first-mover advantage. Discussions will focus on the first suggestions (especially if early speakers benefit from a halo effect, too). Mr Kahneman recommends that to overcome this, every participant should write a brief summary of their position and circulate it prior to the discussion. — Anonymous

Barrel of the gun, rounds one two three
She says I have to pick: choose you, or choose me
Metal to the temple, the explosion is deafening
Lick the blood that covers me
She's the last one standing
"Roulette"
Collateral Damage, Track 11 — Gayle Forman

If this is love . . . real love . . . like I've always thought, it's nothing more than a vicious game of Russian roulette. The gun clicks when it comes to you, and you cringe in anticipation that this may just be the last breath you take, but then it continues on, until the next round . . . and the next. Then there's that one time when it clicks and hits you, and you just can't walk away. — Claire Contreras

She's a russian roulette queen, gambling in love with her heart and life on the line — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

I read somewhere that it's called American roulette. It was invented in America, in the goldfields. You put a single shot in the cylinder, give it a twirl, and then - bang! If you're lucky you break the bank; if not, then it's good-bye — Boris Akunin

Heck, who needs things like skydiving and rock climbing for your adreline kick, if you can get it from playing Russian roulette with open windows? — Traveller

Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative "low risk" game. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You'd be doing us both a favor.' 'This drives me bats. You know this drives me bats.' Orin and Hal's term for this routine is Politeness Roulette. This Moms-thing that makes you hate yourself for telling her the truth about any kind of problem because of what the consequences will be for her. It's like to report any sort of need or problem is to mug her. — David Foster Wallace

My life experience has taught me nothing happens by chance. Even the idea of the ball in a roulette game: it's not chance it ends up in a certain place. It's forces that are at play. — Andrea Bocelli

In 2001, the oil companies, the war contractors and the Neo-Con-Artists seized the economy and added $4 trillion of unproductive spending to the national debt. We now pay four times more for defence, three times more for gasoline and home-heating oil and twice what we payed for health-care. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, their homes, their health-care, their pensions; trillions of dollars for an unnecessary war payed for with borrowed money. Tens of billions of dollars in cash and weapons disappeared into thin air at the cost of the lives of our troops and innocent Iraqis, while all the President's oil men are maneuvering on Iraq's oil. Borrowed money to bomb bridges in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. No money to rebuild bridges in America. Borrowed money to start a hot war with Iran, now we have another cold war with Russia and the American economy has become a game of Russian roulette. — Dennis Kucinich

I don't let anyone touch me," I finally said.
Why not?"
Why not? Because I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn't come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. ( ... ) It was a play and I knew how it ended, I didn't want to audition for any of the roles. It was no game, no casual thrill. It was three-bullet Russian roulette. — Janet Fitch

The real first kiss is the one that tells you what it feels like to be an adult and doesn't let you be a child anymore. The first kiss is the one that you suffer the consequences of. It was as if I had been playing Russian roulette and finally got the cylinder with the bullet in it. — Heather O'Neill

The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette. — Christopher Isherwood

You see, John, unless you reduce your needs, you will never be fulfilled. You will always be like that gambler in Las Vegas, staying at the roulette wheel for 'just one more spin' in the hope that your lucky number will come up. You will always want more than you have. How can you ever be happy? — Robin S. Sharma

Now if you'll excuse me, gentlemen, I need to play Russian roulette with our planet's future with the bullet you've so thoughtfully provided. I hope you don't mind if I don't see you out. — John Scalzi

Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling-malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ass at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal. — Bruce Sterling

If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain. — Tom Robbins

His life was forever a chess game played on a roulette wheel. He'd had to take precise, informed, ball-dropping gambles to get where he'd been. — Debra Anastasia

His eldest sister (who modestly prefers to be identified here as a Tuckahoe homemaker) has asked me to describe him as looking like 'the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo. — J.D. Salinger

Albert Einstein said that the only way to win at roulette is to steal from the table while the croupier isn't looking. — Jonathan L. Howard

Hollywood is a roulette wheel. Each project dictates what's going to happen for you next, and it doesn't really matter that your project is critically acclaimed or won awards or has fans worldwide. It's a matter of how many movie tickets and DVDs and on-demand movies that you sell. — Adam Green

The Kremlin is constantly changing the rules of the game to suit its purposes. We are not playing chess, we're playing roulette. — Garry Kasparov

Loading new software into new computers and using it for the first time was like playing Russian roulette. It demanded and got a lot of respect. — Gene Kranz

Stop tryin to be loud as me, cause you can't do that,
Think about it ... playing Russian roulette with an automatic! — Fredro Starr

Comedian Red Skelton once defined Congress as "bingo with billions." These days, it's more like Russian roulette. — Lauren M. Bloom

This is like playing Russian roulette with a Luger rather than a revolver. One bullet, one chamber - and we're pulling the trigger. — Mark Lynas

You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it. — Albert Einstein

Wealth ... or death. Those were the choices Gateway offered. Humans had discovered this artificial spaceport, full of working interstellar ships left behind by the mysterious, vanished Heechee. Their destinations are preprogrammed. They are easy to operate, but impossible to control. Some came back with discoveries which made their intrepid pilots rich; others returned with their remains
barely identifiable. It was the ultimate game of Russian roulette, but in this resource-starved future there was no shortage of desperate. — Frederik Pohl

Sure, my uncle killed himself playing Russian Roulette. But I choose to remember him as a great Russian Roulette player. — Anthony Jeselnik

In the last three months, I've started having creepy dreams that give me a glimpse of the future. Or sometimes a portal will open up in the middle of the night and something will try to kill me. There's no way to know which one I'm gonna get hit with each day. It's kinda like playing Russian roulette every night with a drunk who hates you. — Erica Cameron

Bob exploded. 'There is no such thing as a casual conversation with my mother. Every single word will be twisted recognition until before you know it you're playing Russian roulette in a wind tunnel with a psychotic dwarf, having wagered your birthright for a piece of cheese ... — Meg Rosoff

you is akin to playing Russian roulette: both hobbies have a high chance of ending in a fatality." She — A.W. Exley

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power. — Christopher Hitchens

Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with
Christ on his mind — Charles Bukowski